Robert O. Keohane, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University

This lecture was presented at the University of Sheffield on October 22, 2008, inaugurating the Graduate School of Politics; and at Oxford University on October 16, 2008. I have retained the lecture style for this publication, only making minor changes and additions in the text.

TEACHING
Most of this lecture will be devoted to an explication of how, in my view, political science should be carried out: that is, the processes of thinking and research that yield insights about politics. But I want to begin by talking about teaching. Teaching is sometimes disparaged. Colleagues bargain to reduce their “teaching loads.” The language is revealing, since we speak of “research opportunities” but of “teaching loads.” National and global reputations are built principally on written work, not on teaching. But when we look around, we see that virtually all top-ranked political scientists in the world today are active teachers. Few of them have spent their careers at research institutes or think tanks. In my view, there is a reason for this. Teaching undergraduates compels one to put arguments into ordinary language, accessible to undergraduates—and therefore to people who have not absorbed the arcane language of social science. Teaching graduate students exposes one to new ideas from younger and more supple minds—as long as the students are sufficiently critical of the professor’s views. [Read more.]

Researchers have long recognized that higher education is dominated by professors whose politics are well to the left of the American political center. The cause and implications of this ideological imbalance have been intensely debated since the 1960s. Although critics of higher education, such as David Horowitz, argue that the political imbalance in academia is largely the result of ideological discrimination, emerging research on the views, values, and experiences of the professoriate tells a more complex story. Despite the relatively small numbers in the academy, the findings suggest that many conservative scholars can succeed in a predominantly liberal environment. Drawing on the latest research, as well as their own personal experience, the authors outline steps that conservative faculty can take to avoid needless political conflict and work happily in a profession largely dominated by the Left.

Gary King’s “Restructuring Social Science: Reflections from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science” (PS: Political Science and Politics 47(1)165–73) is an honest reflection on King’s experience as founder of a successful research institute. Our discipline needs more serious refl ection about how we work and what we can learn from each other. In the spirit of such reflexivity I am moved to reflect on King’s piece, and to off er an alternative account. My account is also based on extensive experience, as the longtime editor in chief of Perspectives on Politics (going on six years) and the even longer time editor of the Perspectives Book Review (going on 10 years). This experience leads me to support an emphatically humanistic and pluralistic conception of political science.

REFLECTIONS ON KING’S REFLECTION
King begins straightforwardly: “The social sciences are in the midst of an historic change, with large parts moving from the humanities to the sciences in terms of research style, infrastructural needs, data availability, empirical methods, substantive understanding, and the ability to make swift and dramatic progress…”

In January 2011, a revolutionary chain of uprisings shook the Middle East and reverberated across the rest of the world. Five years later, the results of the Arab Spring have been uneven. This span of time allows for a moment to reflect on the Arab Spring. To augment the content available from Perspectives on Politics, the staff from PS: Political Science and Politics has also made two symposia available for a short time.

As the Arab uprisings led to another spike in demand for knowledge on the region, this symposium makes concrete suggestions for how Middle East politics may be brought into a wide range of thematic courses. The authors introduce frameworks for understanding the less obvious dynamics of the Arab uprisings and suggest concrete ways of integrating these events into undergraduate and graduate courses in political science. They address the dominant frameworks in circulation and introduce primary and secondary materials for classroom use. The articles also suggest fruitful avenues for scholarly research to both engage and move beyond the most common analytic frameworks.

This symposium gives an account of (in)security in post-Arab Spring states by addressing three questions: What accounts for variation in the degree of violence that has accompanied post-Arab Spring transitions; what is the likelihood of further instability as processes of transition continue to unfold; and what steps can internal and external actors take to minimize the danger of violence escalating? The symposium opens with a framework for understanding the relationship between transition and violence, generally. The authors then apply that framework to the particular environments and countries of post-Qadhafi Libya, Yemen, and Egypt. The symposium concludes with reflection on conflict mitigation strategies.

Syria; February 2, 2014: Demonstration against the Syrian regime in the Bustan al-Qasr neighborhood in the city of Aleppo. (Photo Credit: Jalal Almamo)

In January 2011, a revolutionary chain of uprisings shook the Middle East and reverberated across the rest of the world. Five years later, the results of the so-called Arab Spring have been uneven. While authoritarian regimes were overthrown in Tunisia and Egypt, the latter has reverted to a military dictatorship. In Libya, and especially Syria, protests morphed into brutal civil wars. And in Yemen, the regime was able to successfully remain in power. Today the optimism that accompanied the Arab Spring has given way to a pessimism about its long-term effects. Yet the Arab Spring has also raised important questions about political phenomena such as the internal dynamics and resilience of authoritarian regimes, of the spread of protest movements, and on the relationship between the military and civil government. To allow for further reflection on these events, the Perspectives on Politics editorial staff has gathered a number of research articles, symposia, and reflections published in our pages over this time, and which have been ungated with complimentary access by Cambridge University Press. We hope that these pieces will help continue the discussion and provide further insights on the significance of the uprisings.

Preliminary results from the 2014-2015 Graduate Placement Survey is now available!See the results here.

These results indicate no major changes from the previous annual job market reports, with the continuing trend of growth in the share of reported placements for nonacademic appointments, post-doctoral appointments, and not placed candidates. These preliminary results also indicate that several variables factor into placement outcomes, including degree status and subfield.

The finding that the preferences of middle-income Americans are ignored when they diverge from the preferences of the rich is one of the most widely accepted and influential conclusions in political science research today. I offer a cautionary note regarding this conclusion. I demonstrate that even on those issues for which the preferences of the wealthy and those in the middle diverge, policy ends up about where we would expect if policymakers represented the middle class and ignored the affluent. This result emerges because even when middle- and high-income groups express different levels of support for a policy (i.e., a preference gap exists), the policies that receive the most (least) support among the middle typically receive the most (least) support among the affluent (i.e., relative policy support is often equivalent). As a result, the opportunity of unequal representation of the “average citizen” is much less than previously thought. The analysis also shows, however, that substantial opportunity exists for unequal representation of strong partisan preferences. Together, these results reinforce the importance of party identification for understanding policy outcomes and who gets represented. [Read more.]

Intimate ethnography presents a number of challenges: How could I write about my own family in a way that was true to their experience but also an “objective” report? How could I convey telling details without robbing my family of their privacy? How could I rein in my emotions to report their story, and did I pick and choose facts to protect them or to make them more sympathetic? How could I generalize from their experience to that of millions of social assistance recipients? In this Reflections essay, I consider these challenges in light of what other social scientists have said about the issues of close work with individual, sometimes vulnerable, research subjects. [Read more.]